Modern Device has increased the price of the RBBB from $12.50 U.S. to $15. I used to buy 5 for $50, now it's 5 for 67.50. They used to be just cheap enough for me to not buy all the components and build Arduinos from scratch, but it looks like I'm in the manufacturing business now.

I just purchased 5 RBBB PCBs. Looks decent. If you get parts separate, you may save some money. One PCB is $2.4 if you buy 5. Then you have to separately buy the ATMEGA328 from sparkfun (hopefully more will become available later this year), then separately buy the other components. I normally buy my parts from dipmicro.com. From what I just tried, all parts together (1 full set for one RBBB), I spent $2.15 at dipmicro.com

The Ardweeny looks nice for breadboarding, but the RBBB has that power supply (option) that's very handy for a lot of projects.

Yeah, it sucks that the price went up, but it's probably the government's fault: Paul's profit margins are so thin that the Labor Department probably nailed him for paying himself less than minimum wage ]

One idea I had recently was to make a bare bones Pro Mini style board. Since 328's are in short supply at the moment and SM 168's are about £1.80, I was thinking MCU, crystal, reset button and a few caps, same footprint as Mini Pro but with ADC6 and ADC7 brought out as well. No regulator for minimum cost. Probably could be made for £5 ($8) or so I guess (more for a 328). Plausible??

[ I will NOT respond to personal messages, I WILL delete them, use the forum please ]

We have put prices back to almost where they were. We needed to get a little price rise to accommodate chip price rises and other cost increases for our business. (We have a new space in an art space near downtown Providence - google the Steelyard, Providence).

We were sort of shocked (and very heartened) at how much people care about the RBBB. Let me say that we're very glad to see all the Arduino clones and that they all have the copulative effect of enforcing commodity pricing. I believe this is a good thing in general for the Freeduino / Arduino community.

The recent ATmega supply-chain nonsense also has us looking at a surface mount version to keep costs down.